Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focuses on governance, conflict, and security in Libya, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf.
Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focuses on governance, conflict, and security in Libya, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf. At Carnegie, he has led projects on religion and identity in the Middle East, Islamic institutions and Arab regimes, and how the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are affecting society and governance in the region.
His articles, essays, and reporting have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, The New Yorker, TIME, Politico, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Small Wars and Insurgencies, the Journal of North African Studies, Mediterranean Politics, the Chicago Journal of International Law, and the Journal of Democracy. He has been interviewed by major media outlets such as NPR, ABC News, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and the BBC. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations and has testified before the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.
He is the author of The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018), which the New York Times called “the essential text on the country’s disintegration.” His previous book, Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings (Columbia University Press, 2013), was named a “Best Book on the Middle East” by Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines in 2014 and 2013, respectively. He is also the co-author, with Anouar Boukhars, of Salafism in the Maghreb: Politics, Piety, and Militancy (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is currently writing a book on African and Middle Eastern resistance to European imperialism during the interwar period, under contract with Liveright/W.W. Norton.
Before joining Carnegie, Wehrey was a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. He served for two decades as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, with tours across the Middle East and North and East Africa.
He holds a doctorate in International Relations from Oxford University and a Master’s in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University.
Much of the actual progress is being made at the local level, at the direction of local councils and respected tribal elders.
Too often, Bahrain’s ongoing impasse is viewed through the prism of a region-wide sectarian conflict or the county is seen as a pawn in a geo-political contest between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Many of the protesters’ calls in the Eastern Province are echoed by activists elsewhere in the country, albeit at lower decibel levels.
Will change come for Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority?
Benghazi’s recent violence reveals an anguished search for relevance in a country already socially conservative.
Sada is an online journal rooted in Carnegie’s Middle East Program that seeks to foster and enrich debate about key political, economic, and social issues in the Arab world and provides a venue for new and established voices to deliver reflective analysis on these issues.
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